&6 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
:he United Kingdom's benefit, did not rebel when, six days afterwards,
m the 22nd June, they were required to sign an armistice which placed
France at the mercy of a National Socialist Germany, and did not refuse,
ifter that, to accede to German demands for French collaboration with
Germany's continuing war-effort against a Britain who, till yesterday,
had been France's ally, though a German victory over Great Britain
would have extinguished France's last hope of ever being liberated from
the German yoke to which she had bowed her neck. The ostensibly
nationalist Vichyssois slogan'la France seule' was a euphemism for the
unspeakable truth that France had placed herself at Germany's disposal
and had accepted the shameful role of principal slave to a foreign tyrant
nation that had attacked and conquered its neighbours in Continental
Europe as a first step towards attacking and conquering the rest of the
World with sinews of war that were to be reinforced thanks to the
pliancy of Continental European victims who were to be bullied into
becoming their German conquerors' accomplices.

It was true that a demoralized French nationalism would never have
entered into a transaction of which it was manifestly ashamed if the
alternative course demanded by a traditional standard of heroism had
not been beyond the French people's powers of endurance under novel
technological conditions of warfare which had keyed up a once familiar
and tolerable ordeal to an unprecedented degree of severity; but this
turn of a technological screw was not the whole explanation of the
collapse of French moral that had declared itself in A.D. 1940. Part of
the explanation also was that, for nationalist-minded souls, the psycho-
logical difficulty of acquiescing in the abrogation of a national sovereign
independence by a foreign conqueror's exercise of an irresistible brute
force was not so great as the psychological difficulty of taking the
initiative in voluntarily surrendering some agreed part of the same
national sovereign independence in order to enter into co-operation
with people of other nations, on a footing of equality, in a loose con-
federation like the League of Nations or in a full federal union like
the United States—and this though the difference between the re-
spective eifects of these two alternative ways of foregoing sovereignty
was the extreme difference between purchasing security through co-
operation and paying the penalty of subjection for the luxury of choosing
the psychologically easier option of accepting a fait accompli imposed
by force majeiare,

The second factor that was reinforcing the effect of an advancing
Technology in iindermining a parochial patriotism was a victory of
class-feeling over patriotism in a competition for precedence between
two conflicting expressions of sectional corporate self-interest that were
irreconcilable in the last resort. In a France that had been living under
the regime of a front Populate from June 1936 to April 1938 a con-
siderable portion of the middle class had apparently come, by A.D. 1940,
to feel that the aggression of its working-class fellow-countrymen on a
domestic front was a greater menace to the preservation of the middle
class's most highly prized assets than the aggression, on an international
front, of a Fascist Power which promised to protect a compliant French